Papers by Nathaniel Farrell
have already been identified as defenses of poetry. 8 "Prufrock," "Gerontion," and Mauberley have... more have already been identified as defenses of poetry. 8 "Prufrock," "Gerontion," and Mauberley have been called defensive ruminations on their authors' juvenilia. 9 The two most substantial titles on the list-The Waste Land and Spring and All-have been widely read as their authors' respective statements on the politics of form. 10 But there has been only one other study of the defense of poetry as a genre of poetry, Jeannine Johnson's Why Write Poetry? (2007). My work differs from hers in a few important ways, first and foremost in that Johnson is not critical of the received class bias written into the defense as a genre. Part of the reason for this, I think, is that Johnson argues that the defense is brought into verse because her poets-H.D., Stevens, Adrienne Rich, and Geoffrey Hill-bring lyric introspection to bear on the marginalization of poetry. 11 But the poets whose verse defenses I consider in this dissertation-Moore, Pound, Eliot, and Williams-are not lyrical poets. Their work is defined by their commitment to new forms that respond to the new world. Another key difference is that the poems I read convey their defenses through allegory rather than through argument. 12 (In the verse defenses I read, 8
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Papers by Nathaniel Farrell